The Armory Show 2025 will be held at the Javits Center in New York from September 4 (Thu), with a VIP Preview, through September 5 (Fri) to September 7 (Sun). Johyun Gallery will present representative works by five artists—Lee Bae, Kim Taek Sang, Kishio Suga, Kang Kang Hoon, and Lee So Yeon—spanning sculpture, painting, and installation, proposing a visual dialogue between East Asian and Western contemporary art. This presentation unfolds contemporary reflections on matter, sensation, and existence through the material experiments and distinctive visual languages each artist has developed over many years. Furthermore, within a single space, the works of these five artists, each rooted in different cultural and historical contexts, intersect to reveal both the differences and resonances of their formal vocabularies, as well as the convergences and divergences in their artistic attitudes.

Lee Bae presents new works from his Brushstroke painting series, alongside sculptures and his Issu du Feu series. Since settling in France in 1989, he has developed a practice that traverses painting and sculpture, with charcoal—condensing both the life and extinction of wood—as his central medium. In Issu du Feu, cut pieces of charcoal are meticulously arranged and polished into dense compositions; other works layer powdered charcoal and medium into thick, textured surfaces; while the Brushstroke series channels the natural, cyclical energy of charcoal into sweeping gestures, embodying the vitality of the artist’s hand. His bronze sculptures, in turn, compress the residual energy of fire and carbonization, translating the forces of nature into artistic form.

Kim Taek Sang unveils Flows-25-9, a new work shaped by the non-human elements of water, pigment, light, and time. In his process, diluted pigment is repeatedly poured and dried over canvases laid flat on the floor, gradually producing stratified layers and subtle intervals, where faintly absorbed colors generate delicate vibrations. Over the past three decades, this meditative and performative approach has culminated in his distinctive body of work he terms dàm-hwa(“faint painting”), a pictorial world that organically interweaves nature, medium, and concept.

Kishio Suga, a seminal figure of the Mono-ha (School of Things) movement, has long explored the interrelations of matter, space, and time by situating unprocessed materials such as wood, metal, and stone in spatial relationships. Since co-founding Mono-ha with contemporaries in the late 1960s, he has moved fluidly between outdoor installations and indoor works, visualizing tensions that arise at the thresholds of presence and absence, and at the boundaries where materials meet. For this presentation, Suga will exhibit the assemblage work Site of Void, continuing the sculptural language that he has recently developed through his major solo exhibitions at Dia Beacon and in Chelsea, New York.

Kang Kang Hoon captures moments where memory and emotion intersect through his portrait After Sunset and a new work featuring a cotton motif, Cotton. His gestural brushwork, tactile textures, restrained depiction, and nuanced play of light convey the emotions condensed within the figures and objects on canvas.

Lee So Yeun introduces her distinctive self-portrait series, in which personal objects such as glasses, hats, and headbands are juxtaposed with the figure. In her canvases, objects and persons become one another’s portraits, rendering fragments of memory and fluid identities into painterly form. For this presentation in particular, Johyun Gallery departs from a conventional white-cube staging and instead emphasizes the artist’s narrative by placing Black Mask at the center of the installation.

At The Armory Show, Johyun Gallery will present to New York audiences a multifaceted spectrum of contemporary art surrounding materiality, sensation, and existence, articulated through the diverse media and visual thinking of five artists. Each work asserts a strong presence on its own, yet together within the booth they generate cross-references and visual rhythms that coalesce into an integrated artistic experience. Through this, viewers encounter not only the individual narratives embedded in each work, but also the multidimensional landscape of contemporary art collectively shaped by their convergence.

Opening Hours
September 4, 11:00 – 20:00 (VIP Preview)  
September 5 – 6, 11:00 – 19:00 
September 7 11:00 – 18:00 

Address
The Armory Show 2025 _ Booth 401, Javits Center 429 11th Avenue New York, NY 10001

Artist
Lee Bae, Kim Taek Sang, Kishio Suga, Kang Kang Hoon, and Lee So Yeon

Exhibition Dates
September 4 – 7, 2025

Website
https://www.johyungallery.com

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/johyungallery/

Contact
press@johyungallery.com
+82 10 3550 1170

(Text and images courtesy of Johyun Gallery)